“I’m not destroying this country, child. I’m saving it.” Her face softens. “Look at you. Look at what you’ve become.” She says it without malice. Ify hears admiration in her voice. Wonder. “The look on your face, the straightness of your limbs, the strength in your bearing. Walking through the fires of Abuja to get here, that was your transformation. You are beautiful. Hardened, strong, healed.”

Tears spring without warning to Ify’s eyes. “I am not healed, Xifeng!” Her bottom lip quivers. “I’m not.” Her gun hand shakes. “It . . . it still hurts.” It comes out as a squeak. A pitiful, mournful squeak, and Ify hates it—hates it with all her heart—but she can’t fight it. “It hurts so much.” Her world blurs behind a film of tears. “Why did you make me do this?” Even as she asks it, she knows the answer. Xifeng has told her a number of times what her mission was. But maybe if Xifeng sees right in front of her the evidence of what her plan has wrought, if she has to feel in her fingers and see with her eyes the blood and smoke that has happened because of her, if, somehow, all of the death and destruction is made real for her, then maybe she’ll give up. Maybe she’ll relent.

Maybe she will admit she was wrong.

Nothing in Xifeng’s expression changes. Her posture remains the same. Chin held defiantly high, eyes locked onto Ify’s, arms loose yet secure at her sides.

“Xifeng, what happened? How did you . . . how did you become this? You used to help bring refugees to safety. You were about peace. And bringing resources to help those in need. You were helping!”

“Things were different during the ceasefire. When war returned, everything changed.”

“This isn’t my fault,” Ify hisses, suddenly angry again. “All of this, everything going on above us, this is not my fault.”

“If those suicide bombers hadn’t followed you to Enugu five years ago, there’d still be peace.”

“How dare you,” Ify hisses through her teeth. Before she knows what she’s doing, she has her gun hand raised. Just as she’s about to hit Xifeng, she sees out of the corner of her eye a numbers display. The numbers blaze as though counting down to something. That’s it. There it is. The virus is being uploaded.